The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America

Citation

Ben Wisner (2015), "The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 24 No. 3, pp. 417-419. https://doi.org/10.1108/DPM-01-2015-0019

Knowles begins this excellent book with a discussion of nineteenth century urban fires such as the great Chicago fire of 1871 and finishes with the attack on the World Trade Towers. He makes three principle arguments (pp. 12-13): “[E]ffective disaster knowledge usually crosses and often redraws disciplinary boundaries”; “[M]oving disaster expertise into action has generally required the creation of innovative organizational forms […]”; “[T]he American city provides an unprecedented crucible for disasters […].”

Translating this into terms familiar to the international community of disaster risk reduction (DRR) practitioners, one could say the following: first, knowledge about hazards, vulnerabilities, capacities and resultant risks is heterogeneous, often penned up in academic and professional silos and requires to be effective an interdisciplinary and inter-communal dialogue based on trust and mutual respect. By “inter-communal” I mean that lay people’s knowledge also “counts.” The proliferation and mainstreaming of so-called community-based disaster risk reduction shows that it is co-production of effective knowledge is possible when outside specialists engage in a conversation with local people. Second, the membrane separating science (Knowles’ “expertise”) and policy is more like a brick wall, often surrounded by a moat and few entries, each of them with fierce gatekeepers. Where there should be osmosis, there is siege. Implementation (the term used by both the United Nations Secretariat for the International Disaster Reduction Strategy (UNISDR) and its critiques) is difficult. The UNISDR since 2005 has promoted the creation of disaster reduction “platforms” in 168 countries that signed a set of DRR guidelines, the Hyogo Framework of Action (HFA). Many new laws have been passed. We will see if Knowles’ notion of “innovative” institution describes any of these top-down bureaux created by top-down encouragement (and some cash) by the UNISDR, bilateral donors (aka “development partners”) and the World Bank. Third, more than half of humanity lies in cities. Many of these cities are coastal, riparian or located on or near earthquake faults. Global climate change will impact these cities in diverse and complex ways. Much of the planet’s urban population lives in under-serviced, self-built, informal settlements (what Mike Davis calls “planet of slums”). As a result, cities world wide are, indeed, a “crucible” of hazard (key word in a collection edited by Mitchell in 1999). Not surprisingly, the UNISDR has launched a campaign focused on safety in cities (www.unisdr.org/we/campaign/cities).

Knowles’ focus is, of course, the USA. The book, like those of Charles Perrow and Ted Steinberg (work cited by Knowles), who also seeks to illuminate the place of disaster in American organizational culture, is essential reading for students, researchers, policy makers and their advisors in the USA. However, I would argue that as regards the “mastering [sic] of risk” (and its difficulties), America is no exception. A lot can be learned by people in other parts of the world by reading this book.

Returning to Knowles’s specific project, he divides recent US disaster risk management into three periods (pp. 14-18): the Conflagration Era, the Civil Defense Era and the All-Hazards Era. The first spanned the 1860s until the 1940s and was driven by rapid, unregulated urban growth and public outcry and political fall out from very large urban fires. Technical study of the causes of fire advanced, and eventually building standards were created and applied and are now taken for granted even by Tea Party Republicans who oppose “government regulation.”

The second was the dominant paradigm during the 1940s until the 1960s and was driven by the cold war. During this period preeminent institutions were created to apply social science to questions of human behaviour during disasters, for example the Disaster Research Center at the Ohio State University that later was moved to the University of Deleware, where it has just celebrated its 50th anniversary. Research by these teams exploded many disaster myths – that people panic, that they loot, for example. But, alas, these have turned out to be persistent to a remarkable extent (López-Carresi, 2014).

The “All-Hazards Era”, according to Knowles, began in the 1960s and continues into the present. Knowles does a good job of describing early efforts to assess hazards across a large and diverse national space that include hurricane, flood, earthquake, tornado and wild fire among others. He recounts the creation of FEMA and then its transformation into a subunit of the Department of Homeland Security (DHA). Viewed from outside the US, some would see Project Impact during FEMA’s Clinton years as its high point, a turn toward prevention (“mitigation” in FEMA’s specialized lingo) based on local partnerships involving citizens, local government and the private sector (pp. 277-279). FEMA’s reorganization under DHA is largely to blame for federal government’s delayed and inadequate response to hurricane Katrina (p. 289 ff).

This is an insightful and useful book. Knowles immersed himself in the written records and publications of the eras he studied. The photo he found of the young Bill Anderson (p. 232) – so tragically lost to the DRR community in a bike accident in Hawaii in 2014 – gives a sense of his careful, detailed archival research. Perhaps because of this deep immersion in detail, Knowles occasionally fails to see the big picture. In discussing the “discovery” of vulnerability (pp. 239-249), he fails to mention environmental racism and justice. Beginning in the 1980s with the work that led to the publication of Bullard’s Dumping in Dixie, there has been a strong counter narrative in the USA that argues risk is allocated along racial and class lines (Bullard, 1990/2000)[1].

Knowles identifies himself as a historian of cities. He does not claim to be among the “disaster experts” about whom he writes. He has read deeply as an historian should and also widely, yet never outside the mainstream, Mike Davis’ Ecology of Fear being the one exception. He missed critical counter narratives such a those of environmental racism and justice (Social Science Research Council (SSRC), n.d.) and voices that attempted frame 9/11 as to do with more than “security” and “terror”(Alexander, 2002). Nevertheless, this is a book everyone should read.

Note

See also Bullard (1983a, b) and Pastor et al. (2006).